Mario Tronti

Certainly we must assert the novelty, the originality, the autonomy of Marxism. But the novelty of Marxism against any other philosophy consists not in asking more of it as a philosophy; its originality consists in its offer of science to philosophy, or rather in its conceiving the proper philosophy only as science, as a “specific conception of a specific object.”

One absolutely cannot accept that there exists a researcher who offers material to the theorist, and then there is a theorist who re-elaborates it and produces theory. Rather, there is a continuous unity realized already within Marxism, and it lives precisely in the person of the Marxist.

First one has all of Marx revolve around Hegel, then one removes Hegel from the center and says: see, Marx fails to rotate on his own. This is how the interpretation of a theory coincides with its liquidation. In fact precisely this misunderstanding has driven Marx’s thought to the margins of contemporary philosophical thought.

The birth of the polit­i­cal as a prob­lem lies at the ori­gins of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. The impact, the inter­twin­ing, the exchange, the con­flict is between the state sub­ject and the tran­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ism. With­out the State, from its ori­gins, no cap­i­tal­ism.